


Ⓧ

by MostFacinorous



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Coughing, Horrific discoveries, M/M, Tentacles, bloody noses, Ⓧ
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-14
Updated: 2013-10-14
Packaged: 2017-12-29 09:11:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1003616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MostFacinorous/pseuds/MostFacinorous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ⓧ Something is watching Carlos. Something has been for a while now.<br/>Something bad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ⓧ

It was dark outside.

Carlos had never known what the real dark was like until coming to Night Vale. 

Long-time residents referred to the sky as the void, and they weren’t far wrong. The lack of light pollution should have meant there was a surplus of stars, but that wasn’t the case. There was nothing. No lights aside from the Arby’s sign, the red beacon off in the distance, and the glow cloud, whenever it happened to be in the area. Tonight, though, even those were muffled by the layer of fog.

He couldn’t see the moon, which, while not common, wasn’t completely unheard of. The first time he’d asked Cecil about it, he’d rambled something about needing new blood, and how they had to pay the lighting bill in a more timely manner.

He’d assumed that was just the local Night Vale folklore for the new moon, and though, according to his charts, it wasn’t time for that yet, he shrugged it off. Things were different in Night Vale. He was pretty sure he’d been dead once. Who knew? Maybe being dead threw off the calendar for you somehow.

Regardless, he was sitting outside on the roof of his lab, looking out at a surprisingly quiet and peaceful night. In fact, now that he thought about it, it was too quiet; too peaceful. He’d never truly known Night Vale to be either.

He scooted closer to the edge of the roof, intending to look down on the street below in the hopes of glimpsing the reassuring form of a secret police monitor, or a hooded figure, or someone—anyone to just remind him that he wasn’t alone in this desert night that felt more isolating than any cell or cubicle.

But when he did manage to glimpse the street, all he saw was a lone figure.

At first he thought it was Cecil. He had the same sort of shape, not tall, or short—neither fat nor thin, but he’d never seen Cecil in such severe clothing. Cecil liked color and tasteless fashion. This man… looked like he was headed to a funeral. Or else the fog and the void and the street lights were sucking all of the color out of him. Hard to say.

Still, something about the man seemed wrong. Terribly wrong. Looking down at him felt a bit like staring directly into the dog park, while listening to hooded figures humming static into your ears. It wasn’t until he registered the wrong feeling that he realized the figure had extra limbs. Long, snakelike and unfurling from his back, the… tentacles, for lack of better word, whipped out as though tasting the fog, while looking like they were made of more of it themselves.

He scrambled back just as the man whipped his head towards where he had been, but he didn’t see his face. Probably for the best; he had the feeling that if he had, something truly terrible would have happened.

He decided that that was enough void gazing for the night—that pseudo encounter had left him shaken, and as he climbed down the ladder into the attic of his lab, he found himself gripping the rungs tightly and doubled over, coughing up a storm.

When it abated, his eyes were watering and his throat felt raw.

Definitely too long outside. He needed to lay down and rest up. He was sure there would be something new that needed explaining in Night Vale tomorrow.

As he rolled into bed and pulled his blankets up, though, he found himself hoping—rather unscientifically—that the mysterious man in the black suit wouldn’t be involved in whatever it was.

⊗

Carlos forgot all about the man until several weeks later—which was completely understandable, with all of his instruments suddenly glitching and going staticky or just plain dead at random, before springing back to life less than an hour later.

Out of sight, out of mind. For all he knew, the man in the suit had just been passing through.

It turns out, though, that that was not the case.

He was at home, a rare enough occurrence on its own to merit being made note of, but it seemed that his technological troubles weren’t limited to the lab.

It started as a single bar of pixels traveling down the screen of his TV at a rate much slower than the refresh rate. Honestly, at first, he thought that perhaps this was just the program that was on tonight. He had legitimately tuned into “Polar bear in a snow storm” once, and so far as he could tell, that was just a narrative voice over talking about a polar bear- though they clearly knew nothing about polar bears—while a screen full of static danced on a loop.

This, though, was supposed (he thought) to be a program about the growth rates of cacti native to RadonCanyon.

He tried adjusting the cords on the back of the TV, tried making sure the box was properly plugged in, and suffered another coughing spasm—promptly written off to the dust that he had just found hiding on the shelves under his TV. He really needed to come home more often and clean. Or hire someone. Maybe an intern at the lab…

By chance he looked up and caught sight of someone just outside of his window, through the partially open slit in his blinds. He fell backwards and hid behind the arm of his loveseat, peering over it to see if whoever it was was still there.

He could make out a black tie on a white shirt, under a black blazer. He could make out the general hue of a face, but not… not the shape of one. But still, the head turned, and he realized the dark hollow under the brow bone was just flesh—no eye, no nose, no mouth—faceless, but not in the way other things here were faceless. Faceless, here, could mean not being able to pin down a single face in your mind, as it was changing and moving too fast for the human eye. Faceless could mean that there was just a nothing there, a shallow hole that led to the world beyond the head the face was in, even though that person had a back to their head.

This.

This was something else entirely.

And when their eyes (or what passed for eyes) met, he started coughing again, and the attack was so intense he found himself curled on the floor by the cough, wheezing and teary eyed. But the next time he looked up, the man was gone.

He reached for his phone and called Cecil, who was there before his eyes had even stopped watering.

“Well of course there was someone outside your window, my silly Carlos.” Cecil didn’t sound worried in the least. That made one of them.

“This wasn’t an official—this was just… someone. Maybe a something. It had no face.” Carlos knew he sounded manic.

“Are you sure it wasn’t just a balaclava? That is what they’re for, after all.”

“No, Cecil! I—I saw its face. But there were no eyes, there was no mouth—they weren’t covered, they just weren’t there. Like a layer of skin had stretched over them and was contoured to the skull underneath. It was… terrifying.”

Cecil’s smile drooped, and he sounded unsure.

“Maybe you should call the police and see if they saw anything. That doesn’t sound… normal.” Cecil spat the last word like he was afraid of it, but Carlos reflected that it might just be Night Vale’s default reaction to things outside of the approved levels of weird. There had to be a line somewhere, after all.

Maybe this was it.

Cecil waited with him for the police to come, and they reviewed their tapes.

They found nothing.

But around the time that the event would have taken place, there was just unbroken static. Even the audio was gone.

Cecil asked if Carlos wanted to stay at his place that night, and Carlos agreed.

They didn’t sleep much, between Carlos’s coughing fits and his nightmares about faceless men getting closer every time he blinked.

⊗

He saw him again that same night. He woke with a start and Cecil was gone. The man in the suit without a face was standing at the foot of the bed, his head cocked to the side, as if he was measuring Carlos up, somehow. But he wasn’t exactly standing. His feet hung as though useless, and the extra limbs supported him, some planted firmly on the floor, some braced on the walls and ceiling, and some loose and thrashing, seemingly unable to make up their mind about whether or not to reach for Carlos.

He was taller than Carlos remembered him being, he thought, though it was hard to tell with the tentacles holding him up. Thinner, too, as though someone had pulled him like taffy. The way he was proportioned seemed to lend credibility to that fanciful thought. But Carlos couldn’t think of that now; he was busy reacting to the intruder.

Carlos stood, his legs getting tangled in the sheet, and lifted the bedside lamp as a weapon against… whatever he was.

“Where is Cecil?” He demanded, leveling the lamp at him. He did not shrink away from the light, but the shadows it cast across his face made the shallow hollows of his eyes seem darker, really brought out the recesses of his cheeks and temples. Carlos started coughing, but held his breath rather than succumb to the tickle in his throat.  The bulb stuttered and went out like a flame that had met with a breeze. He looked down at it, shocked, and then back up. But in just that moment, the man was gone.

Carlos fell backwards against the bed, aware of the warm trickle of blood sliding down his face. His head was heavy, and there was so much black around his vision. Everything felt tenuous and far away, and he wondered if he was suffocating. He couldn’t breathe and the scent of blood on his mouth was suffocating. He… he--

When he woke up, the sun was out. He came out of it with a start and instantly tried calling out for Cecil, but his throat was so dry. He coughed, and a pile of bloody mucus launched into his palm. Staggering to the bathroom, he was terrified at first by the amount of blood all over his face and chest, but after a bit of shaky cleaning, he realized that it was just the nosebleed he hadn’t been able to clean up before he lost consciousness, the night before.

Remembering that made him remember the figure standing by the bed, watching them, and how Cecil had been gone. But that was just a bad dream, wasn’t it?

“Cecil?” He called careening out of the bathroom and down the hall, half expecting to find Cecil in his apron in the kitchen, ostensibly making breakfast, but really mostly producing thick clouds of black smoke.

“Cecil?” He called again. No answer. The linoleum was cold under his bare feet, and he felt feverish. Disoriented. The world seemed to be sliding around him.

Every cabinet was open. Every window, too, and the screens had all been slashed. The front door was hanging off its hinges.

Where were the police?

He rushed outside, but there was no one around.

“Police!” he called. “I need the police!”

He didn’t even know if 911 worked in Night Vale.

Fortunately, he didn’t really have to find out. Just saying the words brought two from the bushes, and one balaclava clad officer descended from a ceiling tile in the hall way.

“What seems to be the problem here, Carlos?” The ceiling ninja policewoman asked.

“Cecil’s missing. There was some sort of intruder last night—I went unconscious, and when I woke up this morning there was so much blood--”

“Did you dispose of it properly in a sanctified blood stone circle?” One of the bush police men spoke up.

Carlos shook his head and scowled.

“That’s not really the priority here. Cecil—the voice of night vale—is missing!” He was annoyed and anxious and terrified for his boyfriend’s safety, and they wanted to know if he’d bled in the right place.

“Alright, calm down. Can you describe the intruder?” The police woman seemed to be the most useful here, so Carlos focused on her.

“He was tall and thin, in a suit. Black pants, black jacket, white shirt, black tie. I’ve seen him hanging out before, just you know… lurking around. He um. He has no face. But not like normal not having a face. His head is there, but it’s flesh all over.”

The silent bush cop was taking notes, but paused and looked to the woman for instruction. She scowled.

“Listen Mister Scientist. I may not be a smart science guy like you, but everyone knows things have to have at least one mouth. Usually when bad things happen, it involves more mouths than that, but--”

“That’s speciesist profiling.” The silent one said.

“My _point_ is,” She spoke over him, “There is no reason for a thing with no mouth to steal a person. Everyone knows missing people get eaten. Come on, boys. Let’s get back to doing _real_ work.”

Carlos was left to stare, shocked and terrified. Now how was he supposed to help Cecil?

⊗

He went looking, hoping against hope that maybe it was just that Cecil had been scared off by the man-thing. After all, the police woman was right—what motive did it have for taking Cecil?

Sure he was the voice of Night Vale, but that wasn’t like being the mayor or something; he was just a voice on the radio.

So he tried to remember all of Cecil’s favorite spots, which… considering the town, was basically the whole town. Which took all of a day to search.

Of course, Cecil wasn’t to be found.

Carlos spent a little time turning it over in his mind. He could ask around, but it might help to have some kind of image of the faceless tall man.

That in mind, he opened up a laptop in the lab that was connected to their video surveillance system.

He also opened his journal. He started rewinding the tape to go back to the last time he’d seen the man at the lab, but a screen full of static made him pause. He played it back, trying to tell when this had happened and what had caused it.

Just before the screen went to grey, he noticed movement in the window of the lab. He rewound a little further, cut the playback time by half, and there was the faceless man, walking casually by. Then his head turned, far faster than it should in the slow motion,. Carlos didn’t realize he’d leaned in so close, but at the movement, he rocketed backwards in his chair.  The moment the man’s eyes—or the hollows of his eyes— or the shadowed spaces where his eyes should have been—made contact with the camera, the screen went to static. 

Carlos’s hands shook as he turned the page, and recorded the date and time on a fresh sheet of paper.

He flipped back to the earlier pages, on a whim, and checked to see what else had happened that day.

Less than a minute later, his equipment had all gone static.

His eyes widened, and he looked at the long list of all of the recorded equipment spasms, which he’d been attributing to EMPs.

With a trembling hand, he pressed the button to rewind the tape again.

He had to be sure.

Over the last few weeks, there had been dozens of incidents of electronic interference. And in most—not all of them, but most, he could fine the faceless tall man lurking around the lab. He wondered what that meant for the times it had happened in his home—had the tall man followed him there? Clearly; he’d followed him to Cecil’s, after all.

He rewound past the first date he’d recorded, wondering if maybe it had started before he’d started taking note of the anomalies. The timestamp came up and he tried to hit play, but instead only succeeded in making it rewind faster.

When he finally did manage to get it to stop, it was several months back. His eye was drawn once again to the window, where he saw Cecil walking by nonchalantly. His heart stung at the reminder of what he’d taken too long to come to appreciate—what he’d now lost to who knew what.

He started fast forwarding, and found that there, again, was Cecil. And again. He double checked the time stamp. This was weeks before they’d started dating. He was in some of this video, puttering around, disassembling clocks and performing tests on the masses inside. And there was Cecil, walking by the window that the faceless man seemed to favor.

This time, though, Carlos looked closer. He did work next to Big Rico’s, maybe Cecil just went there on his lunch break a lot. But on this pass through, he noticed that he blurred, and on a whim Carlos rewound it, his eyebrows knotting together.

He pressed play but slowed it down and… there.

There was Cecil, walking by, until his head whipped around too fast to be fully seen at regular speed, and then he turned his head back.

Carlos rewound again and played it back even slower.

This time, when Cecil’s face was pointed directly at the camera, he saw, for the tiniest fraction of a second, a lens flare coming from his eyes.

He rewound and did a frame by frame, and paused on the screen just before the glare. Cecil’s eyes had gone entirely black, and in the center was a thin white spot. A pinprick of light in eyes the color of the void.

A trick of the camera, he thought.

He fast forwarded to the next time he saw Cecil.

There it was again, that casual pass by, with a neck achingly fast turn. The darkening under Cecil’s brows, the black overtaking the white, then the pinprick, and the momentary white out flash, then Cecil continued on his way.

Carlos leaned back in his seat and let the tape play, his eyes going out of focus as months old daily routine filled the screen, and a lot of things started running through his head.

Had…Cecil been stalking him? He’d known that Cecil was loud about his affections,  but he’d written him off as basically harmless from the beginning.

The first mistake, as he well knew, that one could make in this town. Often, it would be that person’s last mistake.  But time had passed, and he’d grown fond of him, and then to love him…

Cecil was already there, past his defenses, curled comfortably in his heart. And maybe… maybe he wasn’t all human.

But he was _Cecil_. And he was missing. And Carlos had to find him.

He took the screen grabs that he needed and printed them out, gratified to see that the face of the tall thin man could be shown on paper.

He began by taking it out to Old Woman Josie. He figured if nothing else, perhaps the angels had seen something.

⊗

“Yes, I used to see a lot of him. It was just before the Angels arrived—he used to come over a lot. I was lonely then, and probably would have liked the company—the only person I saw regularly back then was Cecil, and only on our bowling nights. He could have knocked, could have come in. But… he always lurked outside. It got to where he was here more often than not, though I couldn’t always see him. And then the Angels came, and he stopped. That was right around the time you came to town, too.”

“But he always just… stood there? I mean, have you ever heard of anyone else complaining of having seen him?”

“The old scout master, he sometimes acted like he was looking for someone. That Steve Carlsberg, he gets that way sometimes, too. That’s mostly it though, I think. Or at least, those are all the ones I know of.”

“But he never kidnapped anyone?” Carlos pressed and Josie shook her head, then stopped suddenly and tilted it to the side, her brows knitting.

“Are you sure he has? Cecil is on the radio now.”

Carlos listened only for a moment before rushing to his car. He turned the radio on and turned the car towards the station, confused, troubled…and a little more than hurt when he heard the casual flippancy of Cecil’s voice.

What had happened?

He’d barely been driving for a few minutes when suddenly the words coming from his speakers were distorted, stretched and deep, until he couldn’t make them out. The background rose up, heavy static overtaking the droning of what had been Cecil’s voice.

He parked next to Cecil’s car in the parking lot and got out, leaning on the hood the way he did every time that he met Cecil here.

He resisted the urge to storm into the studio, to wrap Cecil in his arms and demand to know that he was okay.

He didn’t have to wait long, though. The show ended, probably due to technical failure, and Cecil came out, looking harried and distracted. He didn’t even look up as he rushed to his car, almost completely bypassing Carlos.

So if Carlos’s cry of “Cecil!” came out a little sharper than intended, it wasn’t entirely his fault.

Still, Cecil dropped his keys and jumped in surprise.

“Oh, hello Carlos.” He didn’t sound excited at all to see him. In fact, he hardly even sounded like himself. He sounded like he did the first few minutes after being reeducated.

But he’d sounded just fine on the radio a moment before.

“Cecil, what happened? I woke up last night, and you were gone.”

“Was I?” Cecil asked, still absent sounding. “I guess I was. I’m sorry.”

“There was someone else in your room, Cecil. A man without a face. He was standing over the bed and you were gone, and I thought--”

Cecil’s eyes finally met his and, inexplicably, he seemed to thaw.

“You were… worried for me.” He spoke slowly, then blinked and shook his head. “Oh Carlos, no. I’m sorry. I just—the management called me in. I left you a note. Um.”

“What about the man?” Carlos pressed on, confused and disconcerted about his boyfriend’s responses to all of this.

“I don’t know anything about any other men, Carlos.” Cecil said quickly. “Are you sure it wasn’t just the faceless old woman?”

Carlos shook his head.

“No. He was tall—I was laying down so it’s hard to judge how tall. But tall, and thin. And he wasn’t faceless the way faceless things are faceless. He was…”

“Slender Man.” Cecil whispered, his eyes trained on the ground again, his shoulders hunched like he was trying to curl in on himself.

“You know him?” Carlos asked, surprised.

“I… have to go. Bye, Carlos.” Cecil said, no longer hollow, but not happy, either. He sounded completely miserable, as a matter of fact.

Carlos watched him drive away, letting his emotions play out, curious- in the same sort of detached way that scientists were often curious- about what emotion he would settle on. He concluded that at least he had a name—which was more than he had to go on before. Perhaps this Slender Man had some kind of hold over Cecil, or was threatening him in some way.

Though he seemed more sad than stressed out—perhaps he knew him? Perhaps they were friends, or he was… a weird ex.

He would find out what was going on. He had to. 

⊗

He went home first, though. He resolutely closed his blinds and made sure his doors were locked.

Now that he knew Cecil was in no immediate danger, the toll of his day’s worth of emotional rollercoaster was hitting him. He felt slower than he should, lethargic. Almost fuzzy, like he was developing a cold. And tired. So tired.

He felt his nose begin to run, but when he reached up to brush it off of his upper lip, his fingers came away bloody.

He jerked his head up, looking around wildly, and then the doorbell rang.

He peered out the peep hole, expecting more than anything else to be met with an eyeless socket, or a tie, considering the relative heights of himself and this… Slender Man.

Instead, it was Cecil.

He opened the door quickly.

“Come on in—sorry, my nose just started—hey!” He’d been pressing a paper towel to his face until he could go and grab some tissues, but Cecil’s eyes had gone wide, and he’d pulled it out of his hands, before pressing a single finger to the tip of Carlos’s nose.

He felt an odd suction in his sinuses, followed by a loose popping sound that echoed through his skull. Pain flared, sharply, like a migraine. He clutched his head, reeling a little, and Cecil led him to his couch and got him to sit down on it, holding his shoulders gently.

He stood in front of Carlos until the pain faded and Carlos could open his eyes again, and waited until he did, blinking up at Cecil who was haloed by the light from his ceiling fan.

“You have got to stop thinking about me.” Cecil said.

Carlos blinked. That—what?

“What?” he repeated, not sure what that had to do with anything.

“He’s confused. He thinks you’re calling out to him, because he’s confusing you thinking about me with you thinking about him. And don’t think about him, either. It’s not safe. For you.”

“Him? Slender man?”

“Yes, him. You have to stop thinking about us, him and I. I think that’s why he’s bothering you. It’s like you’re calling him out to you.”

“I can’t just stop thinking about you, Cecil. You’re my boyfriend—I love you.” Carlos was confused by all of this. “Wait hang on, what do you mean he’s confusing the two of you? What do you have to do with him?”

“Carlos…” Cecil turned his head away from him and sighed, his entire posture screaming of discomfort. “I _am_ him.”

“What?” He found himself laughing. “Cecil, you can’t be, you--”

Cecil took a step backwards and from his back sprang… they looked like dense, dark fog, and immediately, Carlos recognized them.

“Cecil.” He whispered. He heard a high pitched squeal in his ears, and was aware of a wetness on his upper lip again as he stared, uncomprehending, up at his boyfriend.

“I’m sorry Carlos. You weren’t supposed to know. You weren’t supposed to be affected. I thought—“

Carlos reached out for Cecil, but his vision was going into a tunnel, the black edges creeping downwards.

Cecil looked down at him, and his face was stricken and sad.

“If I’m not careful, it’ll kill you, Carlos. I can’t let that happen. I have to go now. I’m so sorry, I hope you’ll forgive me. Dearest Carlos—“ He broke the words off and left, Carlos’s consciousness was lost just as the front door clicked shut.

⊗

He spent the next day mulling over Cecil’s words and googling “slender man” “the slender man” “slenderman”, and following every link he could find.

As near as he could tell, the key was exactly what Cecil had said. Don’t think about him. The more you think about him, the louder the call, the more like an invitation it was. But no one seemed to have any exact answers about what he did. Did he steal people, engulf them, take them to places undefined but definitely not on this plane of existence? Did he cut them open and hang their bodies in the branches of trees, their internal organs removed, neatly bundled, and replaced? Did he simply stand around until one became paranoid and was driven mad?

He didn’t know. But he did turn on the radio for Cecil’s show, and wait for it to start. Once it had, he left it on, to monitor it, make sure his boyfriend was where he was supposed to be. He was going to confront this Slender Man.

Because no matter what Cecil said, he couldn’t possibly be the same person. There were too many sightings, too close together in time and too far apart in distance, and Cecil had only ever left Night Vale to visit far flung (and possibly nonexistent) parts of Europe.

He knew Night Vale was odd, though. That ‘I am him’ wasn’t necessarily literal. Maybe he was… Slender Man’s son, somehow. Maybe they were tangled together by something that evaded his science’s reach. It didn’t matter—he would work around it, and figure it out.

They could make this work.

So he unlocked his door, opened it wide, sat down on the couch with two cups of tea out, and thought-- hard—about Slender Man. He felt a little bit silly doing it, felt like an idiot, like when he was younger and had tried out some of those _hypnotize yourself!_ Cds for science. He was picturing Slender Man with all his might, when Cecil’s voice over the radio became strained.

“Listeners, I’m sorry but I’ve just been… called away. I will hurry as best as I can but I take you now to… the weather.” There was the harsh noise of a microphone being turned off by unsteady hands, and immediately afterwards Carlos’s phone rang. He ignored it and redoubled his efforts of picturing the slender man, picturing Cecil next to him, picturing them backing away from one another.

He had a good imagination. He was a scientist, after all.

His phone rang again and he let it ring, but kept picturing Cecil and Slender Man together in front of him.

When his door opened, it was just Cecil—panting, red in the face, sweat all but pouring off of him.

“Carlos.” He sounded so relieved, so glad that he’d made it, but he was fidgeting, too, and keeping his distance.

“Carlos stop please, you’re still… you’re calling him now, you’re calling him and I can’t—“ The door that he’d closed behind him whipped open and the sky which has been bright and blue that morning was dark, thunderous and pouring rain.

Carlos kept focusing on Slender Man, calling him out. Challenging him.

“CARLOS.” Cecil was yelling now over the rush of wind blowing into Carlos’s apartment, upsetting his experiments and rifling through his books. Papers were blown against the wall.

Cecil pulled open his shirt, exposing his tattoos—tattoos that Carlos had traced with a gentle finger their first night together, still basking in the after glow. Now, they were glowing on their own, a soft blue light that came from under the skin.

“You’re doing this, Carlos, please, please understand…” Carlos watched as the intricate design burst, the way balloons popped, pieces shattering away from a central point and disappearing.

“Look Cecil, it’s working. I’m setting you free!” It made sense—the tattoos were eyes, eyes that the Slender Man didn’t have, and tentacles—the Slenderman’s hold on Cecil. There was also lettering, in a language so ancient that he’d never encountered it—or perhaps it was just from somewhere he’d never heard of. Either way—

“Carlos, no, you’re setting him free. Please.” Cecil sounded so distressed now that Carlos couldn’t help but be taken aback. He’d thought—

“No, oh no… too late, Carlos.” Cecil slumped down where he’d been standing, his eyes wild through his fingers where they wrapped across his face and around his head.

He rocked forward and back slightly.

“Carlos, please, I’m sorry. Carlos, run. Go to Josie, go to the angels—go!”

Carlos was frozen in his seat, watching as Cecil elongated, first his fingers, then his arms, wrapping around his head then around his body, and finally his legs growing until his knees were higher than his face.

His clothing fluttered in the wind storm that had become his apartment, and then it grew stiff and dark, and slowly everything went still. Still and silent and _wrong_.

Cecil stood, though that seemed like the wrong word for it. Cecil _unfurled_ , and soon he was towering over Carlos. But he wasn’t Cecil any more. He’d become something else. He’d become SlenderMan.

Apparently he _had_ meant it literally. Good to know.

Carlos coughed, doubling over, and felt his nose start bleeding… but he was so much closer than he was used to, and the blood was coming out of both nostrils. He felt wetness on the side of his face and realized his ears were bleeding, too.

Fuck.

Slender Man advanced, and Carlos came to the instant and altogether sobering realization that he was about to die. He hadn’t listened to Cecil, and he’d made Cecil into this, and now he was going to die for it, and Cecil was going to feel guilty. Even though it was his fault. All his.

“No! No you listen right now. Cecil—Cecil is mine. I can think about him all I want. And I don’t care if you show up, and if I black out every time you do. I don’t care, do you understand? Because it’s not going to make me stop.” He was shaking now, wracked with shuddering breaths as his lungs compressed in his chest, and it got hard to breathe. He felt an ache in his ribs like he was being slowly crushed, and he glanced down to see that he _was._ He couldn’t feel them but the tendrils from Slender Man’s back were twined around him, tightening until he was gasping for air, but he did even so, words spilling defiantly from his mouth.

“Cecil, I know you’re in there. I don’t know if you can hear me. But if you can—I’m sorry. Don’t—“ He groaned as he felt the first rib shatter under the pressure, but forced himself to keep going. “Don’t blame yourself okay? I love you. I do—I’m sorry that I didn’t--- didn’t—oh god.” The next few happened simultaneously, and he almost passed out from the pain. But suddenly the grinding of his bones stopped. The grip didn’t loosen, but it did pause. He wracked his mind, trying to discover why.

“I love you.” He whispered it now, too weak and too close to passing out to put any real voice behind it. “I don’t care what you are. I don’t mind this side of you—I wish you’d told me before. But I—I don’t blame you. I love you. Please—“ He appealed directly to the faceless face, now. “Please don’t let Cecil hate himself for this. Don’t let him hurt. You’re good at erasing things. Tapes. Photos. Minds. Slenderman… if you kill me, make it so Cecil won’t remember. It’s—I don’t want him to hurt.” He was half delirious by now, and his vision had narrowed to a tiny pin prick of light in a sea of swarming darkness.

He felt himself lower back onto the floor, laid out gently before he was let go of.

As the pressure was released from his chest, he lost consciousness, and his very last thought was to reach out for Cecil with his mind, and hope that he could feel it, the way Slender Man had felt his calls in the first place.

⊗

He woke up later in a hospital room.

He had never been to the Night Vale municipal hospital, but he had heard tiny bits of horror stories. He tried to remember how he’d gotten there.

The hand currently gripping his brought the world crashing back into focus, as did the pain in his side when he tried to roll over to look at Cecil.

The noise he made woke Cecil up, and his face lit up and then quickly fell.

“You um. You’ve been out for a few days.” Cecil said, swallowing. “I don’t know how you survived, honestly. But. Here we are.” He sounded forcedly cheery, like he was dancing around something for Carlos’s sake.

“I told him that I didn’t care if he was part of you. I love you anyway.” He said, deciding to be direct because he didn’t have energy to be otherwise.

“You—you told him that?” Cecil looked shocked, and he checked his tattoos, probably to be sure they weren’t upset by this talk of ‘him’.

“I mean it.” Carlos’s eyes had slid shut—the effort of keeping them open was too great.

“You’re crazy.” Cecil breathed, sounding in awe of him, and Carlos’s lips twitched upwards.

“Your tattoos lock some sort of eldritch monster under your skin… and I’m the craziest thing in this room?” He murmured.

He heard Cecil stiffen and cracked his eye open, turning his head to look at him.

“Hey… I was joking.” He knew he sounded tired and mirthless, he should have thought before he spoke. “I don’t mind. Promise.”

“I was afraid to tell you.” Cecil was nearly whispering now, his voice very low. “I… I grew up hearing scary stories about. Well, about him. And then I hit puberty—that magical time in a boy’s life where they go through changes, right? Well I did the usual. Voice deepened, hair grew, tattoos puddle onto my skin… but they weren’t the usual teenaged tattoos. You know, how most guys get like, guitars, hot rods, and the name of whoever they’re dating… and then as they grow up they either change or fade away completely? Mine… Mine were all these warding spells. And my Mother—she read them and unlocked them the first time, and he came out.”

Carlos had his eyes wide open now, and he was watching Cecil’s face. Cecil, in turn, was watching him, as though afraid he’d change his mind.

“When I woke back up, all the wards were back in place, and my mother was… I don’t think anyone understands how much I miss her, how guilty I feel about—she died, Carlos. Because of him. I had… a pretty lonely school career after that, to put it mildly. Once I was done with school there were no ties, so I… went traveling across Europe. Came back, and my voice had seasoned enough, I’d gotten some hair on my chest, and more tattoos had sprung up. It looked like he was thoroughly under lock and key. But then someone grew a crush on me, started thinking about me, a lot. And he came out…” Cecil shook his head.

“I took a position at the station as an intern. I was desperate and I didn’t care what happened to me, and the position had a bit of a reputation. But one day the broadcaster got dissolved into a puddle of orange goo, and someone had to report on it, so… suddenly I was promoted. And people didn’t see me as much, so they didn’t think about me except when I was on air. And if a whole bunch of people are thinking about me, it’s less like a call and more like a… a blanket of noise. Until one person thinks more of me. Like you.”

“I think very highly of you, yes.” Carlos mumbled, to prove he was still awake, still listening. 

Cecil looked down at him fondly and brushed his hand over Carlos’s hair.

“I know. Thank you. And… thank you for… for not being afraid of the rest of me.”

“Don’t get me wrong—he’s scary. But not once you know that you’re under there somewhere. He can’t be all bad, if he has to share parts of you. Same heart.” Carlos shrugged, then winced at the pain that the motion caused.

“I think so. Any way I think I am going to get some new tattoos… maybe get some counseling. See if there isn’t some kind of specialist to help me… communicate with my inner monster.”

“Sounds good. I can support that decision.” Carlos said, drifting off even as he spoke.

“Sleep well, Carlos. I’ll watch over you. And if anyone tries to hurt you, I’ll let him out.”

The last thing he saw before his eyes slid closed was Cecil’s smile, a little sharper, a little more vicious than normal, as a tentacle of dark grey fog pulled his blanket up to his chin.

Somehow, it was comforting. And if his nose let a drip of blood out while he slept, well. He didn’t see what wiped it up.

It was probably for the best.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you like this, please check out my other Night Vale stories, or feel free to chat with me in the comments or on tumblr at MostFacinorous.tumblr.com!


End file.
